COSTAR: Improved Temporal Counterfactual Estimation with Self-Supervised Learning

Abstract: Estimation of temporal counterfactual outcomes from observed history is crucial for decision-making in many domains such as healthcare and e-commerce, particularly when randomized controlled trials (RCTs) suffer from high cost or impracticality. For real-world datasets, modeling time-dependent confounders is challenging due to complex dynamics, long-range dependencies and both past treatments and covariates affecting the future outcomes. In this paper, we introduce Counterfactual Self-Supervised Transformer (COSTAR), a novel approach that integrates self-supervised learning for improved historical representations. We propose a component-wise contrastive loss tailored for temporal treatment outcome observations and explain its effectiveness from the view of unsupervised domain adaptation. COSTAR yields superior performance in estimation accuracy and generalization to out-of-distribution data compared to existing models, as validated by empirical results on both synthetic and real-world datasets.